“But we already solved the mystery. Right?” Caroline asked.
She had a point. But Lara wasn’t about to admit it. If she were being perfectly honestly, it stung a little that Caroline had figured out that something might be wrong with Dad before she herself had noticed. Caroline didn’t even want to be a detective! Not like Lara did. Now it was her turn to decide on a mission for her detective agency.
“We don’t know why Dad lost his job,” Lara pointed out. “That’s part of the case.”
“I guess so. But I’m not sure how we can find out more than we already know, and besides, aren’t we going to be busy? You know, with school.”
Lara scoffed. “We won’t be in school all day. There’s no reason for it to intrude on FIASCCO business. But if you don’t want to be involved anymore, you can just say so.”
“That’s not what I meant!”
“Well, it sure sounded like it,” Lara told her.
A fierce frown still glued to her face, Caroline paused in the middle of typing her response. “Do you hear something?”
Lara tried to silence her thoughts and listen to the outside world. Sure enough, footsteps echoed from downstairs, accompanied by loud Benny-chatter.
“We need to get out of here ASAP,” Lara said.
Caroline nodded and slid toward the door. Lara took one last look around the disorganized office and sighed.
By all rights, their progress in the investigation should be a cause for celebration. Yet Lara felt as though boulders were tied to her feet as she scurried away from her father’s office.
CHAPTER EIGHT: WORDS AND WORRIES
Caroline thought perhaps that discovering the truth about Dad would change everything right away. But for the next week, life in the Finkel household plodded on more or less as usual. Benny still raced around with his toy cars. Noah still spent most evenings away with his friends, returning just before the curfew Ima set. Lara and Aviva still bickered over issues both large and small. (Their most recent kerfuffle erupted when Aviva tried to instruct the rest of the family on the correct way to prepare hummus.)
Soon, a very big distraction from the Dad problem began to eat up more and more of Caroline’s thoughts.
Tomorrow, Caroline would officially be a middle school student. Tomorrow, everything would change. And so tonight was one of those nights when sleep was quite impossible. There were far too many thoughts flitting around Caroline’s mind, each one spawning another chain of thoughts until she just about burst with worries—dark splatters of paint blotting a perfect white canvas. Within the splotches of brown and black, she saw a classroom of kids laughing at her. She saw herself sitting alone at lunch, everyone whispering and pointing. She saw Principal Jenkins, looking at her with pitying eyes as she explained that she was very sorry, but girls like Caroline just weren’t suitable for Pinecone Arts Academy.
Caroline rolled over. In the dark she could just barely make out the huddled mass of blankets on the other bed, swaying from side to side. She grabbed her tablet off the floor.
“Lara?” she asked. “Are you up?”
“Yes. What’s going on, Lina-Lin?”
“What is middle school like?” Caroline asked. Most of her thoughts kept going back in that rather terrifying direction.
A huff came from the other bed. “It’s middle school. There are classes and some of them are good. Some of them aren’t. Watch out for gym. You should cross your fingers and hope you end up with Mr. Locke for that one. He’s the nice one, even though he doesn’t look like it.”
Caroline had not previously given much thought to gym class at all, but the news that only one gym teacher could be described as nice alarmed her. Still, that wasn’t really what she wanted to know.
She stared at her tablet screen and debated how best to approach her real question. Ultimately, she decided to just say it. “What about the other kids?”
Lara paused for a longer-than-normal amount of time before answering. “It’s not really that different from elementary school. All right, well, maybe it is, but there are still good people and not-so-good people. You just have to find the good ones, Lina-Lin.”
“And the not-good ones?”
“Those we avoid. By any means necessary.”
Caroline thought about the matter. Things didn’t sound quite so terrible when you put it that way. Although she couldn’t help but wonder how, precisely, one might go about avoiding the not-good people. Lara’s tour of Pinecone Arts Academy had not included any secret passageways that one could just slip into whenever a pesky person happened to be around.
Still, Lara was trying to be reassuring, and she appreciated that. “Okay,” she said.
Silence descended upon the room, and it went on for so long that Caroline thought maybe her sister had managed to drift off into sleep after all.
Then Lara spoke again, voice quieter. “Look. I’m not going to tell you a bunch of lies just to make you feel better. Middle school is . . . well, middle school. It’s not always fun and some of the kids are real jerks. I’d be happy to give you a list of the worst ones, though that would only cover the ones in my grade. Well, and a few of the eighth graders that are especially jerky.”
Caroline snorted at the idea of a jerky-people list. It was such a Lara thing to do.
“But it’s going to be okay,” Lara continued. “I’ll be there if you need anything, and most of the teachers are okay, really. If anyone gives you a hard time, just tell one of them. Or better yet, tell me. I’ll make sure they don’t try anything.”
Caroline ran a hand through her hair. She appreciated Lara’s need to protect her. Really, she did.
But she most certainly did not want to begin her life in middle school by running to a teacher for help—or worse still, her big sister. The memory of their visit to the
